CH 70.1

Return It To You (1)

Old Jian secretly observed Ruan Qingmu, feeling slightly nervous in his heart.

Looking at his tiny face turning red, he was probably furious.

He let out a deep sigh. “Ruan Qingmu, ah. Don’t be sad and don’t get stirred up. Student Qin Yuan said it very well. The clean is clean*. As a teacher, I believe in your grades! Please don’t take those lies and slanders seriously…”

*T/N: The clean is clean (idiom): a person who is innocent, even if he does not clarify with his own words, he’ll naturally be proven innocent.

Ruan Qingmu’s expression was a little weird and he coughed lightly. “Teacher, I’m all right.”

“Oh, all right, ah…” Old Jian wanted to say something but hesitated. “It’s good then. It’s good then.”

Ruan Qingmu’s gaze was somehow hazy as if there was a ripple in it or a flowing light coming from inside his eyes.

He smiled, seeming a bit as if his soul had traveled to the ninth heaven and he suddenly said to Old Jian, “Teacher, isn’t there a simple way if I want to prove my innocence?”

“Ah? What?” Old Jian was slightly stunned.

“During the end of the term, I will try to get my Chinese and English scores a little higher and increase all other grades.” Ruan Qingmu’s expression couldn’t be distinguished as carelessness or sincerity. “It’ll be fine, right?”

Two sophomore-year girls sat obediently in the school infirmary.

Dr. Gong wrote the medical record with dragon-like strokes while reprimanding them with a scowl. “Still want to diet at this body weight! You ate so little breakfast without any milk and egg. The hell if you don’t faint from hypoglycemia!”

The girl, who fainted and was carried here by a classmate, muttered in a low voice, “No. I’m not on a diet. It’s just that I don’t have any appetite…”

The young, handsome school doctor raised his voice. “You don’t have an appetite because you’ve starving yourself! Without enough energy and nutrition, you will be tired, lethargic, inattentive, sleepy, and less effective in your studies, understand?”

He sounded as if he was doing a crosstalk guankou* and smoothly continued to speak endlessly.

*T/N: Guankou: a form of “speaking” in which the speaker speaks a long passage in one breath, requiring fluency, clarity, and rhythm.

“If you go on, you will have gastric mucosal damage, chronic gastritis, gastric erosion, gastric ulcers, endocrine disorders, skinny bones, and anorexia. Do you understand?”

The girl’s face was so pale from his lecture that she didn’t dare to say a word and almost cried out.

Then, Dr. Gong stood up and looked for medicine in the back cabinet.

The student accompanying the girl that fainted lowered her head and secretly scrolled her phone before suddenly whispering to her companion. “Hey, top student Qin came out this morning to clarify the post that said Ruan Qingmu cheated in the midterm exam last night!”

“Wah, is that true? Let me see it.”

The two girls leaned closer to look at the phone. Suddenly, Dr. Gong’s cold voice came from behind.

“What cheating?”

The two girls were startled and hurriedly explained in low voices. “No, nothing. It’s only a rumor.”

One girl suddenly thought of something and mustered up her courage, whispering, “Oh, right. You’re also mentioned in it.”

Dr. Gong reached out to take her phone and sneered after looking at it.

“Enough, you guys can return. Remember to eat breakfast.” He strictly warned again, “It’s not that I want to scare you guys. Several areas in the brain are particularly sensitive to sugar deficiency. They are responsible for learning, memory, and regulating movement. Damage to them can even be irreversible. At your age, don’t do anything stupid.”

The two girls hurriedly nodded. “Mm. We understood. We will make sure to include milk, eggs, and soy milk in our diet in the future.”

Dr. Gong busied himself for a while, sorting and categorizing some of the common medicines that had recently come in. Then, he grabbed his phone, found the school’s forum, and looked at it again with a cold face.

By noon, the cafeteria was packed with people.

Ruan Qingmu, Bai Jing, and the others ordered their meals and found a random place to sit. Class 1’s courses differed from theirs and the teacher often liked to drag out their lessons. After a few glances, no one from Class 1 could be seen in the cafeteria.

Bai Jing poked the meatball on his plate and looked around, secretly scolding people in his heart.

During the break in the morning classes, a fight broke out between the anonymous poster and Qin Yuan’s clarification post, with the two sides quarreling endlessly.

One group of anonymous people did not believe that Ruan Qingmu’s grades had turned around in half a semester, saying there was definitely an inside story to this. The other group retorted with Ruan Qingmu’s essay, saying it was powerful enough to prove everything.

The anonymous people immediately jumped in again, saying that the essay and the broadcast script were proof that Ruan Qingmu’s Chinese was really good. Still, it was unscientific to say that his English was also so good.

In any case, more people from the other classes were still skeptical. Those who went up and firmly defended the two bosses were from Classes 1 and 9 and they were still slightly on the losing side after this battle.

Ruan Qingmu lowered his head to eat while frowning. “Fang Li isn’t here again?”

Huang Ya hesitated. “We’ve called him. He said he wanted to go to the bathroom and told us to go first. He’ll come later.”

Ruan Qingmu silently raked through his rice, not saying anything.

Recently, Fang Li didn’t come to the cafeteria at all and always dawdled until the students were almost gone before coming to eat alone.